Online but Not Alone: Teachers’ Perceptions of Effective Online School Leadership (OSL)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Online school leadership (OSL) is of particular interest given the growing number of online education opportunities. As school districts develop more online and blended learning programs, particularly for secondary grade students, the need to examine leadership in these programs is paramount. The literature suggests that most studies focus on effective leadership in bricks and mortar schools, while limited research focuses on leadership in online programs. In this study, we aimed to explore teachers’ perceptions of leadership in online secondary schools in two districts. Our questions focused on secondary teachers’ experiences with leaders in their online schools and how these experiences contribute to perceptions of what makes for effective leadership practices. Using phenomenology, we interviewed six teachers, analyzed for themes and categorized these into a sense of community, organizational learning and empowerment to represent teachers' perceptions of OSL. Based on these results, we suggest that OSL consists of both foundational and contextualized practices, and that both are necessary for effective OSL. This research has implications for educational leadership broadly, but specifically for leadership in online education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".